Jamia Millia Islamia, a central university funded by Indian taxpayers, has once again revealed the ideological lens through which it views Indian society. An examination question in the Social Work department asked students to “Discuss atrocities against Muslim minorities in India, giving suitable examples.”
The paper was part of the B.A. (Hons) Social Work Semester I examination for the course Social Problems in India. While framed as an optional question, its wording has ignited debate because of what it includes and what it omits.
The framing is not accidental. It is deliberate. The question does not ask about communal violence in India. It does not ask about victims across communities. It directs students to see violence through only one identity, while erasing others entirely.
This is not academic inquiry. This is narrative training.
Remembering Akhlaq, Erasing Ram Gopal Mishra
The question gained national attention after journalist Swati Goel Sharma shared the exam paper on social media. The reaction was swift because the bias was obvious.
Indian academia has spent years repeatedly invoking the Dadri lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq. That case appears in classrooms, seminars, and textbooks. Yet when Ram Gopal Mishra was killed during a Durga idol immersion procession in Bahraich in 2024, his name found no place in “social problems” discourse.
https://twitter.com/NewsAlgebraIND/status/1846520907541401828?s=20
This pattern is familiar. Hindu victims are treated as inconvenient facts. Muslim victims are institutionalised as a curriculum.
That is not a coincidence. That is ideology at work.
The Violence Question Academia Refuses to Ask
If Jamia genuinely wanted students to study violence honestly, it would ask uncomfortable questions. It would ask who commits the most communal violence globally. Or It would ask why religious majoritarian violence overwhelmingly emerges from peaceful groups, not just in India but across the World.
It would ask why Hindus are being lynched, burned, and driven out in Bangladesh today. Dipu Chandra Das was recently beaten and burned alive by a mob for just being Hindu and falsely accused of blasphemy. Temples are attacked. Hindu homes are torched. Yet Indian universities remain silent.
Why does social work education stop where Hindu suffering begins?
Because those facts disrupt the narrative.
Taxpayer Money, Ideological Teaching
Jamia Millia Islamia is not a madrasa. It is a state-run university. Its classrooms run on public money contributed by Hindus and non-Hindus alike. That funding demands fairness.
Instead, students are trained to see one community as perpetual victims and another as invisible.
When examination questions themselves frame social problems through a single communal lens, classrooms risk becoming echo chambers. Education shifts from inquiry to conditioning. That is where concern deepens.
When violence by so-called “peaceful” groups is ignored, excused, or sanitised, academia becomes complicit.
Silence is not neutrality. Here Silence is endorsement.
Silence From Jamia Is the Loudest Answer
Jamia has offered no explanation. No clarification. No apology. That silence only deepens the suspicion of what many already suspect.
This is not an isolated question. It reflects a deeper ecosystem where selective empathy is normalised, and Hindu suffering is systematically excluded.
Universities shape future social workers, educators, and policymakers. When those institutions teach selective memory, they prepare students not to heal society, but to divide it.
Jamia Millia Islamia Has Now Acted After Public Backslash
Jamia Millia Islamia has now acted after public outrage. The university has suspended a Social Work department professor for setting what it has termed an “extremely provocative and communally polarising” question in the Semester I examination. An internal inquiry has been ordered, and an FIR is being filed. Jamia has acknowledged that, as a Central University with a mixed student community, such framing is unacceptable and reflects malicious intent.
https://twitter.com/KanchanGupta/status/2003402246479081739?s=20
Education Cannot Be Propaganda
Violence is real. Victims exist across communities. Any academic institution that pretends otherwise is lying to its students.
Jamia’s exam question does not encourage analysis. It prescribes belief. And when belief replaces inquiry, education collapses into propaganda.
India deserves universities that confront reality, not curate ideology.
Taxpayers deserve classrooms that teach truth, not narratives.
This controversy is not about free speech.
It is about intellectual honesty.
